Thanks for the support everyone! We're just polishing and optimizing the game as much as we can before we release the game! This is something we added so far: We made the foliage shake a little when you walk through it. It looks really cool when you're going through large clumps and the rustle sound it makes really sells it.
Cool stuff! You could even add some leaf particles when it exits or enters the folliage to sell it even better. By the way, you guys are going to Casual Connect Asia too right? I'm showcasing there as well, would like to meet you guys there and test out the game
I hope you guys realize what Nintendo just did and go the f2p route with micro transactions. Fire emblem heroes generated MORE money than Mario run...Mario is iconic/everyone knows who Mario is/fire emblem is known by the hardcore gaming crowd...the downloads were over 10x the amount of Mario run free but FEH has made more money than Mario run and it constantly makes money daily where as Mario as a one time purchase will pretty not make any more money. If you want to make a killing go f2p with micro transactions.
*facepalm* Thanks Dr. Obvious, anyone knows this. If your goal is to make as much money as possible, you have to go F2P. However...if you want to make a good game, go premium.
Well, this is a touchy subject for most game developers. In our humble opinion, we believe that the pricing model has to fit the game you're making. Yes, f2p games tend to earn more than premium titles, but they would earn even less if its not designed well for f2p. Designing an f2p game takes a widely different approach than a more traditional premium title that most game developers are used to. You'll have to consider retention, ARPDAU and whole host of other things. You'll need to design a game that is fun, but just frustrating enough for players to want to spend money to grease things over(which is why you see so many games having energy systems, or premium gems to speed up certain things). An f2p game really requires a ground up approach, and the monetization has to be incorporated into the design itself. This is opposed to a premium design where the developer's chief concern is making a game that is fun, looks awesome and flows well. You don't really need to care about retention or monetization because these are taken care off in the the initial purchase. Of course, the initial purchase is the hard part. Now all that being said, what happens if you make an f2p game that wasn't designed to be f2p? Let's say you make a fun title, looks super polished, but has none of the key monetization/retention design that will make players spend money and keep coming back? The sad truth is that you'll earn even less than if you made your game premium. For an f2p game to succeed, you'll need a large amount of players, and for most of those players to keep coming back everyday. This is also why you see alot of f2p games with the same mechanics(gacha, loot boxes, boosters etc) So in conclusion, it really depends on the game. If the game you have isn't a good fit for f2p, then don't make it f2p. Yes premium games tend to earn less money, but can still be successful for smaller indie developers if done right and given enough support(please support Cat Quest!). What most people don't realise is that the really successful f2p titles(Clash of CLans/Royale, Fire Emblem, Pokemon GO etc) also have very large teams behind them. They have people to maintain the servers, people to manage daily/weekly events, people to constantly create new content to keep players coming back. It's not possible for a small team of say 2-3 people. It's really more of games as a service at this point. Now this is not a knock on f2p games, far from it. Our first title, Slashy Hero, is an f2p title, and we did make a decent amount of revenue from it. But we could have made much more had we designed it to be a better f2p game. Part of us always wonders how well it would have done if we had gone premium instead. We might have made much less, we're not sure. So with Cat Quest, we're both excited and super nervous. It takes some balls to release a premium game in today's market, but we're gonna take the risk. In some ways, we're really dumb, but all we want is to make an awesome game!
Thanks for the response and I do hope you do well. I've been following you guys for a long time as you can see I posted way back in this thread as well before. I think you are mistaken with the big f2p games having big teams, yes they have more than 3 people but most teams are about 10-15 people for the bigger apps. I do hope that you realize that you can't price the game for $9.99 as that probably was part of the reason many didn't buy Mario as it felt too expensive for a phone game. On the other token if you price it for $4.99 or less you have to SELL double or triple the amount to make the same revenue that you would have made if it was $9.99. One of the things I think people don't realize is that if it is a buy 2 play game then the support for the game will dry up faster than a f2p game, as you, the developers have no real reasons to keep updating the game. In a f2p game most new content for example heroes or items can be not only added to the game but added to a cash shop as well to sell where as any new content to the game in a buy 2 play model will now have to be added for free or else you really piss off you base since they will feel like I ALREADY bought the game now your asking for more money for a update WTF almost no one does that in this day in age on apps. One last thing...ofcourse players on these forums want a buy to play model...these are hardcore gamers...they don't like being nickeled and dimed to death, I mean no one does but these are the guys that really would drop a few twenties on say fire emblem heroes rolling for new heroes cause the banner is really good. If they had the option to buy FEH with all characters unlocked for $10 they would. Casual gamers are gonna see a price tag and be more resistant to buy because of all the free games out there... capturing the casual market is where all the money is at. Why spend $5 when there are a million free games to play...getting the hooked on a free game and then selling something in a impulse buy is how developers make the big bucks. Take warbits (practically a game the advance wars fans have been begging for)for example they posted a devs diary or something to that degree about how much profits they made http://toucharcade.com/2016/08/11/warbits-was-a-dumb-idea-that-turned-out-alright-according-to-risky-labs-postmortem/ in the end calling it a dumb idea that turned out alright... Now if only it was f2p with micro transactions who knows how much they would have made? You know I just thought of something though...Since you are set on doing buy 2 play WHY NOT do a kickstarter for the game? They love cats on kickstarter and it will act as a promotion vehicle, you can do like all the mmos are doing selling alpha/beta access early access... special perks like create a monster or name a item/town type things for big backers. Custom special avatars or armors as well etc..
Thanks for responding back too. I agree with you don't get me wrong. A game designed well to be f2p, will generally make more money than a premium title. But it has to be designed for f2p. That's our opinion anyway. We felt with Cat Quest, it would be better to make it premium because of the way an open world game is designed. Adding an energy system would make it annoying to play and might reduce retention. In addition, its hard to gate content in an open world game because by nature, the player has to be able to go anywhere and do anything. I'm not saying its impossible, but I'll happily be proven wrong! XD We did consider a kickstarter actually! And we almost did it in fact. However, looking at our timeline, it didn't make sense, and would have taken too much effort to maintain the kickstarter as well as develop the game at the same time. We do agree it would have been a great marketing vehicle though. But its not the only one.
I think you are looking at it the wrong way, you never should be looking to gate content in a game. Maybe slow down progress but gate/lock out content is a very bad idea. I think any game will make more money as f2p game just look at the MMOrpg markets. They went from monthly sub/buy box model to now f2p cash shops and there more now than ever before on the market. For this kind of game the monetization method I would have done is something like this. Make the game fairly challenging but not dark souls level difficult. Upon death show an ad. Give away loot chests/coin chests/what ever currency you guys are gonna be using that have timers on them similar to clash royal. Premium currency allows you to just like clash royale instantly open said chests. Sell instant openable chests in a cash shop. The chests are RNG bases gears/costumes. You earn chests in game and just go into your inventory, big difference allow infinite number of chests to be stored in your loot section. Similar to clash royal allow only 1 to be opened at a time. Add additional purchasable chest openings slots. IE $5 gets you the ability to open 2 chests at a time Max 4 at a time or what ever you want. In game you also just earn normal loot coins/weapons but make them like basic quality the better stuff comes from chests when you kill a monster/boss they can also drop their chests. There should also be exclusive items that ONLY drop from these chests but you should be able to earn all chests in game from killing monsters. I don't know if you are using coins but I would have coins and have stationary merchant nd a wandering merchant that sells better stuff so people that have horrible luck can sell the gears they don't like and simply buy the gears from him. Glad you guys thought about the kickstarter as I honestly believe that is an amazing marketing platform not only for start up but for anything since they have hundreds of thousands of users now on there. It's like using a USA tv show called "shark tank" a show where someone brings a business to 5 multimillionaire investors and pitches them their business offering them a part of their company for xxx amount of dollars and they negotiate. The show is so popular now that pretty much ANY company that just gets on the shows see an amazing sales boosts regardless of getting a deal with the investor.
There is one problem with F2P games that they have in common with always online games. If the game does not earn enough money to keep the servers and continuous updates going the game has to be abandoned by the developers. Hence you lose your ability to play and along with that goes all your money. Premium games that are offline do not have that problem and so long as an iOS update doesn't break the game you can play it indefinitely. That is why I hardly ever put any money into F2P or online games, though I'm happy to play them. Just another thing to consider.
Any F2P game that throws an ad in my face when I die, gets deleted right away. Definitely one of my biggest annoyances in any F2P game, cheapens the entire experience. As for timers/chests, I can put up with those if the game is worth the waiting to me. If i'm feeling pressed to spend money on it, then it's just getting deleted. Though this is coming from someone who has only spend $5 on F2P games, so i'm obviously not a part of the market being tatgeted.
Ok I love the f2p/premium debate (die hard premium fan here, FYI). But there are more important things like *cough* beta testing *cough*.
We're thinking about an open beta now. So give us some time to set things up. We just had a closed beta with friends and industry people.(spoilers: they loved it) We're also finalizing the game's icon right now, and wanted to get everyone's opinion. Which icon do you think is best?
